updated 11:25 am EST, Fri November 30, 2007

GeForce 9000 in February

The next generation of NVIDIA's graphics cards will roll out early next year with a few key feature upgrades, video card producers in Taiwan claim today. The GeForce 9000 will be the firm's answer to AMD's Radeon HD 3800 and will bring the enhanced antialiasing as well as high-dynamic range lighting of DirectX 10.1 and newer versions of OpenGL 2. The series will mark the first high-end cards to be built on the same 65-nanometer manufacturing process as the GeForce 8800 GT, running cooler and also potentially faster than today's 8800 GTX parts.

Few other details are available about the card, which is due in February. A mid-range card is due in June and will use the even smaller 55-nanometer process for its upgrade. NVIDIA is already known to be working on GeForce 9M mobile graphics and leaked their existence through a recent set of Windows drivers, though the portable chips' release dates are uncertain.